New Hampshire Defunds Planned Parenthood

NEW HAMPSHIRE—Overruling the state legislature and the Department of Health and Human Services, a state Executive Council comprised of elected officials has voted 3-2 to make New Hampshire the latest state to defund Planned Parenthood, all because some of its six clinics use private funds to conduct abortions. In stripping the group of up to $1.8 million in state funding and, because of a quirk in the law, its authority to dispense low-cost birth control and antibiotics to uninsured patients, however, the council has created a situation in which low income inhabitants of the state may no longer be able to afford to get birth control prescriptions filled or the health care they need taken care of at a cost they can afford. But that is not the council’s concern, as Councilor Raymond Wieczorek of Manchester made clear last month, when he said, “I am opposed to providing condoms to someone. If they want to have a good time, why not let them pay for it?” Wieczorek may not care that some of the low income people he is supposed to represent will now have to spend from $40 to $100 for birth control pills that would have cost them no more than $5 at a Planned Parenthood clinic, or that many of the prescription will now remain unfilled. But has the councilor thought through the likelihood that, because of the stripped funding and unfilled prescriptions, there may well be more abortions in the state because of the vote, and not less—not to mention more unwanted children, some of which may, in time, become (expensive) wards of the state? New Hampshire is small, so there is still the hope that many indigent people, of whom there are no doubt more now than in recent memory, will find a way to get their prescriptions (and other medical needs) met at clinics in nearby states, but what if those states fall by the wayside, too? What if, because of tightened budgets, other state clinics are forced to serve only their own citizens? What happens when the good times turn into a nightmare, Mr. Wieczorek? It is one thing to be against abortions. It is quite another to be so blindly against them that you make decisions that actually work against the goals you ostensibly seek to achieve. Unfortunately, that is the inevitable outcome when zero-sum anti-abortionists (and anti-porners) decide that they have the right to impose their beliefs on everyone else. Whatever happened to the great New Hampshire motto, Live Free or Die? Image: An etching depicting the Spanish Inquisition